Dear Dance Community:

Thank you for sharing your frustrations on the title of Sassy Hip Hop with us. This is an issue that was brought to our attention last summer and was not fully addressed by us, which we would like to apologize for and work to correct. We hear you and we acknowledge that we have been slow to gather all concerned for a discussion. We were set to do so in August 2019, but experienced some unexpected, major shifts in staffing, which caused us to lose momentum in resolving this matter. When initially brought to our attention, we were able to reach out to the parties who contacted us at the time; and held some one-on-one discussions to counsel us as to how to proceed.  But, ultimately, we let the ball drop and for that we are sorry. 

Over the last few weeks we had been stepping up our internal actions as a means to check our organizational privilege, as we were not fulfilling our mission and values to support the dance and cultures of our field, and the artists who make these dances. We are currently and will continue to reach out to members of our community for advice on how to best deal with this situation. In addition, we are working to  incorporate weekly training in cultural equity and antiracism  for staff, including online lectures as well as peer to peer partnering through arrangements begun in the last few weeks with a consortium of area arts and culture organizations. We will also work from there to bring our board, our teaching artists and those who perform in our spaces, the training and awareness as a next level of action. 

Thanks to our vigilant community, we are more aware of where we have fallen down and where we need to allocate or re-allocate our resources.  We, of course, will bring this particular situation to a priority placement but also extend our education as to how we deal with honoring the lineage of every dance. 

We are also planning on releasing our Culture of Community Documents, part of our organization’s year long work to create a system for community voice through a collection of a restatement of our mission, values and the subsequent policies, procedures, and best practices, and a vehicle to create more transparency for  the public. COVID-19 has delayed the release  of these documents for review. We have set a new goal to share these documents  by the end of August. The Culture of Community Documents will be in a blog format and will provide the opportunity for our community to engage in live discussions with staff. They will also provide the ability for community participation to add their thoughts, advice, and opinions directly to the documents for discussion and consideration. Moreover, they will be a guide by which to curate our mission-driven activity, namely the creation, performance and study of dance.

Lastly, we will share this information with the teacher of the class in question, as he is the originator of the class’ title and content. We want to clarify that with the exception of a few classes and workshops, we do not hire our teaching artists. They rent our studio spaces, offering an artist-centric entrepreneurial model. This arrangement does not offer a typical relationship often seen in dance studios, where management is more hands on in the details of their teachers. We offer this as clarification of our process and not as an excuse or to shift onus; and we will bring this model into our thinking and discussion on how to be better responsible for what happens at The Dance Complex in the future.

In conclusion, we want to deal with this situation and honor the lineage and future of Hip-Hop. We also want to learn from this situation and apply lessons learned to all dance genres in our community.  We will work to get a facilitated discussion scheduled on the books as soon as possible. Out of respect for those on the front lines protesting against racial injustice, we want all parties to feel they have agency to meet safely and within a space of time that respects their ongoing work. We will post this information on social media as soon as we have a date.

In the meantime, if discussing any of this further live (or remotely) we are happy to arrange a listening session one-on-one. We would especially appreciate hearing if there are recommendations as to who from our community or beyond could add perspective to the discussion.

Thank you for being a part of our community and for bringing these issues to us. We are listening.

Gratefully,

The Dance Complex